Erland Cooper | PHOTO: Samuel Davies
The Scottish composer Erland Cooper will collaborate with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and solo violinist Freya Goldmark to perform his latest album, Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence (2024), on November 9th in Ambleside. This unique project began in spring 2021 when Erland Cooper destroyed all evidence of the album, leaving only its recording on a magnetic tape, which he then planted in Orkney soil, close to where he grew up. The tape was later retrieved in late 2022 and released in 2024, exactly as it was found. In this interview with Mia Farley, Erland Cooper discusses this experimental journey.
Mia Farley: You’ve worked with distortion of tapes before, such as in Landform (2020) with Marta Salogni and Folded Landscapes (2023). What first led you to experimenting with sound through the manipulation of tapes?
Erland Cooper: I think a lot about my favourite things that I enjoy in terms of sound occurring in the natural world. I don’t have a classical education; growing up in the Orkney Islands, my education was folk music, mythology and the natural world – the sound of water on cliffs, birdsong and the wild, ever-changing weather. It’s that wildness that resonates with me, like how producers create soundscapes and it’s often the mistakes that we are drawn to as we listen. It’s in these imperfections that the beauty lies. I think that some of the natural artefacts of sound produced from ageing magnetic tapes are quite aesthetically pleasing to my ear – the cracks, pops and wobbles, known as ‘wow and flutter’ which is quite poetic in itself. I wondered if there was a way to push these artefacts of sound further and orchestrate them.
In terms of the album, what was the motivation behind distorting the tapes to this extent?
It’s a combination of things. I was recently asked on a live Q&A, ‘Where do ideas come from?’ As an open-ended question, I thought that good ideas are perhaps a combination of okay ones stacked up, and that great ideas, or the potential of something great, emerge from a collection of good ones stacked up. In the case of Carve of the Runes, my inspiration came from violinist Daniel Pioro, who motivated me to write my first violin concerto for him. That was one idea. The second was the celebration of the centenary of the poet George Makay Brown, who is from the islands I grew up on. So, I thought, there are two things there. Then I wondered if I could plough the field a bit deeper in my exploration of tape, and if, rather than writing about nature, there was a way to write with nature, with the soil itself. I stacked all these ideas until they aligned so clearly in my head that I couldn’t even sleep until I executed it. It’s a process of slow planning and fast execution.
This isn’t the first time you’ve used George Makay Brown’s poetry in your work. Beyond this mutual feeling of home and passion for Scottish agriculture, is there another significance to using Brown’s poetry in your music?
George had this ability to write about the magic of the everyday. Funny enough, it took a global pandemic for some people to really see some of the beauty outside their windows. He would write about the magic of the everyday in the same way the filmmaker Margaret Tait would do these little patchwork films, focusing on, instead of the macro, the micro; of really finding an entire landscape in a small area.
But of course, George, who passed away in 1996, actually lived a few doors up from me. As a small boy I would bump into him on the local pier or around corners, in the nooks and crannies, and there would be this old gentleman with his legs crossed and I was just a kid with my brothers.
Thinking back on Orkney and how nature is intertwined with this idea of home, what is that feeling of home for you?
My favourite soprano is a curlew. When I hear the curlew bird call, which has sort of a melancholic rising worble, I’ll whistle it, and it’ll remind me of home. This idea is also framed around the north sea, so I’ve been exploring other places where the north sea exists, seeking that familiar feeling of home.
Regarding the album, and in the context of the album’s title that references George Mackay Brown’s A Work for Poets (1954), there’s this idea of creating something ultimately left to chance in its final moments. Does Carve the Runes hold any particular message or meaning for you?
Yes, the aleatoric element, that chance-based element is really important; it’s a meditation on value and patience in a world of instant gratification. I was asking myself which part of the creative process do I enjoy the most: is it writing the piece, or presenting it to Daniel and the ensemble, rehearsing it for a few days, or recording with everyone together in the same room? Is recording the bit that I will etch or carve in my memory that will last forever? Is it when every digital file is deleted, leaving only one copy that suddenly becomes the most valuable thing? Was it when it was planted in the earth and left to chance? Or was it when it was dug up and found? I’m asking myself, even now, ‘What are the bits I will never forget?’ I think it’s the recording with Daniel and the performance with Freya. Those were the two moments. I don’t remember writing or any of the compositional elements. I’m still trying to find the moments of my work that will stay with me the longest, that will mean the most, and I risk sacrificing it all to find that.
Do those moments tend to be, then, the actual performing parts?
Yes, but more the sense of anticipation, which is quite powerful. I go back to Freya’s performance at the Barbican, with two thousand people in the room, not knowing. It’s the not knowing what’s going to happen that can’t be reproduced – the genie’s out of the bottle. Another amazing moment was when I pressed play for the first time [on Carve the Runes]. I was alone, and a filmmaker caught it on camera. I felt deeply moved and excited. Imagine you’ve found something you’ve written five years ago that was lost, and you don’t know whether it was going to exist in the same form. Plus you can’t remember how you’ve written it, nor what you were like at that time. It’s sort of like a conversation with yourself on a timeline. And then you reveal it. It’s so exciting.
I’ve been thinking about what it must have felt like to hear the tape back for the first time. Not only have you forgotten how it was supposed to sound, but it has been physically altered in ways you can’t control. That’s pretty amazing.
That’s the big thing really, what came out of it was how much survived. I think everybody expected for it to be completely silent or sound really crunchy and heavily distorted. But now it’s not only a meditation on value, time and patience, but also resilience of the art of musicians, musicianship and music, as well as tape as a medium. That’s really something to be celebrated and that’s what this concert with BBC Philharmonic represents – a celebration of collaboration and growth. People often ask me, ‘Why did you bury this thing?’ I always reframe it as planting, because planting represents letting light in – collaborating, growing, changing, and evolving into this concert.
It sounds very utopian, in the sense that these moments of utopia represent creation both for your future self and in the act of creation in the present. What do you think about this? Does music have a place in utopia?
In short, yes. In long form, let’s look at this concert as an example, which is almost a utopia in itself. It’s a celebration of community, musicianship, song, melody, resilience, almost acting as an arc of a whole. In a church in Ambleside, with 300 people in the room, that sort of feels like a utopia. It does ask questions about home, on what are you prepared to let go of. But ultimately, it’s planting a seed of hope. There’s one of these overused proverbs that’s something like, ‘The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is right now’. There’s utopian hope in that.
Leaving something for your future self to recover is quite a personal thing, mostly because it offers a stark perspective on how you’ve changed since creating the piece. Did you notice anything about yourself or about the music that you didn’t recognize at the time of making it when you first listened back?
What I heard in conversation with myself was a younger man. I know what I’ve experienced personally in those three or four years, and to me, it represented a sort of remembrance as well as a celebration. I also heard lots of ideas, because I must have poured a lot into the cake since I didn’t know how the cake would come out of the soil. How much would survive, if any? How would it change?
I put a lot of orchestral articulations into the music already that bends and warps, but one moment that made me laugh and cry in equal measure was when I was digitising and listening back for the first time. After sort of celebrating that something had survived, I got to halfway and it went completely silent. I thought, ‘Okay, we got half a concerto; that’s great.’ But then I continued to listen, and I could hear the strings slowly come back in. I laughed my head off because I’ve written into the score, in the same way that I’ve written bending and bouncing in the harbour, or walking through heather and peat, I’ve written in two minutes of silence, and I’ve forgotten! It made me burst into laughter and some moments later, tears.
I think I’m still asking myself, ‘What have I learnt from this?’ One of the big underlying themes is my immense gratitude from tapping into the energy of the natural world and collaborating with some exceptional people, whether it’s Daniel Pioro, Freya Goldmark, BBC philharmonic. I must continue to plough that field because it’s so immensely rewarding. It’s those bits, whether it’s the chance-based element of a meeting, or the chance-based element of losing it all in the soil and it all being deleted. So, I think what I’m learning is to trust that instinct, where all we are trying to do when we create is evoke certain feelings and try to express them into an art form. 
You can get tickets to the performance on November 9th here: Aerial Presents Erland Cooper – BBC Philharmonic Orchestra – BBC
The concert will be recorded and broadcasted on BBC radio 3.